The Home Office is preventing dozens of women and children from leaving Gaza to reunite with relatives in Britain, even though the Foreign Office says it’s ready to evacuate them. Families with applications already in progress remain trapped under bombardment because the Home Office won’t provide the onward travel assurance they need to cross into Jordan and travel to the UK.
This isn’t simply a case of two government departments failing to communicate. The Foreign Office wants Britain to be seen helping civilians escape a catastrophe, while the Home Office continues its job of keeping unwanted people outside the border. One department provides the humanitarian language; the other enforces the exclusion. Both belong to the same imperialist state.
Refugee family reunion applications were suspended last September, with the government promising more restrictive rules in the spring. Those rules still haven’t appeared, but the suspension remains in place. Even families who applied before the change have been left waiting while the Home Office sends senior barristers to fight their cases. The British state can mobilise plenty of resources when the aim is stopping a Palestinian child from reaching their family.
The Home Office claims that applicants must provide biometric information before travelling to Jordan, although the visa centre in Gaza has been closed since October 2023. Belgium, France, Italy and Ireland have managed to facilitate evacuations under the same conditions. Britain could do the same. The obstacle isn’t practical. It’s political.
Lawyers representing the families say Palestinians are being treated more harshly than refugees from other countries. In some cases, the Home Office has argued that family members, including young children, may pose a security risk because they come from a “territory where terrorists operate”. Some of the Palestinians already living in Britain were granted protection because they had themselves been persecuted by Hamas, but even this hasn’t stopped officials treating their relatives as suspects.
This is how imperialist racism works through apparently neutral administrative procedures. Palestinians aren’t treated first as people trying to escape extreme danger, but as a population to be screened, contained and collectively suspected. The language of “security” turns the violence inflicted on Gaza into a reason to punish Palestinians for living there.
The case of PhD student Bassem Abudagga makes the cruelty plain. The Foreign Office has agreed to help evacuate his family, but the Home Office says they may have to wait until December before it decides whether to let them travel. After his lawyers described infested tents, insanitary conditions and frequent bombing, officials replied: “While this is acknowledged the conditions your clients face in Gaza alone are not considered to amount to compelling circumstances under the [relevant] guidance.”
Those words strip away the usual pretence that immigration decisions are guided by compassion. Conditions that threaten a family’s life aren’t considered “compelling” because the purpose of the border system isn’t to meet human need. Its purpose is to regulate movement in the interests of the state, sorting people according to their usefulness, nationality and political status.
“The UK government has abandoned vulnerable families in Gaza after promising to assist them,” said Sarah Crowe, a solicitor at Leigh Day representing some of the families. “The Home Office is blocking family reunification when the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is ready and willing to evacuate them.”
The Home Office responded: “Under our reforms to create a fairer asylum system, family reunion will no longer be automatic. Those seeking to bring family members to the UK will need to meet stricter criteria.”
There’s nothing fair about forcing families to prove that bombardment, disease and life in an infested tent are sufficiently exceptional reasons to live together. “Fairness” here means making exclusion sound impartial. It turns a political decision to keep refugees out into a question of whether they filled in the right forms and satisfied rules designed to reject them.
Britain has helped uphold the imperialist order that made Palestinians dispossessed and unsafe in the first place. It then treats the people trying to escape those conditions as threats to its own security. The same state that finds room for weapons, military cooperation and support for its allies suddenly discovers endless procedural difficulties when Palestinian families ask to be reunited.
The cruelty isn’t a departure from the system. It’s the system doing what it was built to do.
